I don’t have to spend much time talking about how much damage I did to my body during Covid because a lot of people experienced the same hardships. The challenge I face in my industry as a fitness professional is having a body that not only looks strong but looks good, and the latter is more important as far as first impressions go. The predicament I found myself in was this: what's the point of eating healthy and exercising regularly if there's no one to see, and if there's no one to see, who cares and why bother keeping up with a routine?

That was the beginning of my downfall. I indulged every desire I had, going back to bad habits such as smoking weed consistently, and eating the most delicious foods every single day with no regard towards calories or health. Maybe this is where you found yourself too, filling the void with questionable decisions in the most questionable time period of most of our lives. If the future is uncertain, so will my ability to get back on track. When you’re not motivated to do the right things, you find out where your priorities lie.

The only type of transformations you see on the internet are the ones where someone changes their body for the better and tells you all the things they had to sacrifice to become better. What about the transformations where someone gains an absurd amount of weight and discusses the decisions that led them there?

Your environment influences your habits and decisions. If you make it easy to choose bad habits, you only have so much willpower until you give in. I was lucky enough to receive unemployment, and with that money coming in without having to do any work for it, I spent it just as fast and easy as it came in. Every meal was ordered on doordash and if I didn’t feel like driving or riding my bike downtown to the gym, uber was on immediate reserve. I rarely bought groceries, I didn’t meal prep, I didn’t have a night time routine or set bed time, I worked out when I felt like it and that feeling of wanting to better myself decreased as the amount of time staying at home increased.

I believe that everything in life happens for a reason and life comes at you in phases. I believe for how hard I worked at being a personal trainer for 4 years (at the time) taking very little days off and spending most of my waking hours serving others, I was burned out. I’ll never get to experience that type of freedom again in my life and based on the results from the first experiment, I don't think I want to experience that type of freedom again. When you don't have someone to answer to, when you don't have anywhere to be, when you don't have any goals you're working on, is that the kind of life worth living if you are just existing?

When you know what you should be doing but don’t, how do you make the change you need to? You’re always one decision away from a completely different life. I’m not here to tell you how to be better because that would make me a hypocrite. I guess the point of me writing this is to tell you you’re not alone and we share more in our struggles than we do our successes. I’m also here to remind you that you have the power to change at any moment, but if nothing in your routine changes then nothing in your life will change either.

Let’s see where I end up and hopefully my honesty inspires you to do the same. Be honest with yourself because you can only put up a facade for so long...